Endings

I've been reading so many good young adult books lately, most of them recommendation from Jackamo. Here's a rundown of my recent reading activity. (There are warnings about spoilers below.)

The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins: I mentioned these in an earlier post, but I enjoyed them increasingly more as I read through the series. I was deeply touched by several of the characters. This is a youth series with excitement and depth, but also a lot of death and sadness.

SPOILER WARNING:

I really loved the ending. Whereas the events of the series come to a rewarding conclusion, it isn't all tied up perfectly and as a result feels like an honest coming-of-age story for Gregor, who is a preteen on the cusp of adulthood with more experience, courage, and wisdom than most grownups. It's melancholy, but how could it not be after all he's been through? The final detail of his toddler sister Boots finally saying his name properly closes on a hopeful note. The more I mull over the ending, the more I appreciate it.

END SPOILER

The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare: This is rather pulpy but well-written fantasy series for teens. SWS tells me Clare has been accused of plagiarizing everyone from JK Rowling to Joss Whedon to Twilight, but I don't see any more shared ideas in this than I do in most of the other recent fantasy fiction I've read. Even if she borrows many ideas from other authors, she creates her own super fun story. Clare has another series coming out soon--prequels to TMI, and I'll certainly be checking them out.

SPOILER WARNING AGAIN:

The conclusion of this series wasn't as strong. Jackamo pointed out to me that it was written for teens (and Clare seems especially to have teen girls in mind), as the characters had some silly doubts about love, paired up tidily, and attended something akin to a ball at the end. My biggest criticism: I felt there were a lot of ideas here that could be mined for religious significance, as there is a Jewish boy turns vampire and an agnostic girl who not only discovers she has angel blood but sees an angel. These characters never seem to experience the spiritual questioning common to many adolescents, and they have greater impetus to do so! So that is a lost opportunity. The ideas needn't be "churchy" in nature, but it would have added depth to the characters to make them a bit more philosophical.

END SPOILER

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale: With a cheesy name like this, I had expectations for something girlie and saccharine, but Princess Academy is a lovely surprise. It's a Newbury Honor Book focusing more on the value of hard work, ingenuity, and devotion than dressing up in gowns or living in a castle. If I had a young daughter, I'd strongly recommend it to her. It had a satisfying and not totally predictable ending, but I won't post a spoiler about it.

Wild Things

I've got several wild things to address. The first are a series of books by Canadian author Melanie Watt about a paranoid, obsessive squirrel. I chose at random from the library Scaredy Squirrel and Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend. Ben was about as interested as he is in any picture book at this age (i.e., it looks good enough to gnaw on), but Ickie and I found hilarious Scaredy Squirrel's strict daily schedules, emergency plans, potential friend quiz, and fear of germs, walruses, and the unknown. The drawings are adorable (godzilla is town-crushingly cute) and Watt's kooky sense of humor extends even to her author's bio.

Second, I'm in the middle of reading the Gregor the Overlander series by Susan Collins. It's touted as a version of Alice in Wonderland for city kids. The opening sequence where Gregor and his baby sister are sucked down a vent from their laundry room and land in a land of giant rats, bats, and cockroaches is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's work, but the series has its own quest-driven plots. The Gregor series has many of the same elements that make Harry Potter an above-average series: Gregor is a brave kid under pressure who makes decisions with integrity. Most of the characters have complex personalities (especially my favorite sarcastic rat, Ripred), and it's interesting to watch the different species struggle to find common ground.

Third, Ickie just put me on to the trailer for Where The Wild Things Are, the classic by Maurice Sendak. You can watch the trailer here. Several things excite me when I see this trailer. First of all, it looks COOL. Ickie said, "It looks like an indie kids' movie," which is a pretty accurate description. The creatures and marvelous sets appear to have escaped from a Michael Gondry film, and the wild things have a shine and movement in their eyes that makes them look real, not just like giant muppets. They LOOK JUST LIKE the book, and I want to pat their heads to feel their wiry hair and join in the wild rumpus. Another good thing: Spike Jonze is directing it. He directed the super weird Being John Malkovich (which I enjoy for general concept as well as the company video explaining why a building has a 7 1/2 floor). Also good: Catherine Keener plays Max's mom, so even though it appears they made up backstory for Max's home life, I imagine Catherine Keener playing it well without excessive sappiness. And Paul Dano does a voice--he's awesome.

Even if WTWTA turns out to be a dud (which is hard to imagine), it's encouraging to see a children's movie creatively embrace the possibilities of fantastic children's fiction, instead of just a crowd-pleaser filmed in New Zealand or a freakish CGI hellscape. I don't know if Sendak is still alive, but I'll bet he's thrilled no one tried to turn his artistic book into something akin to The Polar Express movie, which manages to make me cringe from the oozing sentiment as well as cower in fear of the uncanny, glass-eyed, zombie children. Ook.

These Are Mine, But You Can Have Some

I made scones last night. I know it's Lent. Shut up. I didn't want the buttermilk to go bad before I had a chance to use it.

Anyhoo, I took a recipe and changed it enough that I think it's fair to call it my own now. I mimicked the technique for the biscuits I blogged about recently. The scones are the best I've ever made. Ickie loved them.

Watoosa's Scones

2 c flour
1/4 c sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
optional: 1/4 to 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 stick unsalted butter, cold & cut into pieces
2/3 c buttermilk, plus a bit more if needed
optional: currants or dried cranberries
egg wash: 1 large egg beaten with 1 tbsp milk

Whisk together dry ingredients. Cut butter into dry ingredients with a pastry cutter until butter is the size of small peas. Put flour mixture in fridge to chill for 10 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Add buttermilk to flour mixture, mixing just until moist (drizzle in a bit more if you want moister dough). Turn out onto a well-floured surface, and knead only a few times. Pat into a rectangle; fold over into thirds as you would a letter. Repeat patting and folding twice. Pat or roll into a circle (about 7-8 inches in diameter) and cut into 6 pie pieces.

Brush with egg wash. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Bake at 400 degrees 15-20 minutes until tops brown. Make some tea. Enjoy scones with jam and cream or just plain, hot out of the oven.

Lyrical Baby

Ickie and I are fans of Candlewick Press. They put out unique children's books, such as A Visitor for Bear, which we gave to our niece last year. The hospital where Ben was born gave us several children's books, and one of them, also by Candlewick Press, is Here's a Little Poem, which we've enjoyed reading to Ben on recent evenings. This collection features sweet, quirky poems by Langston Hughes, Robert Louis Stevenson, and A.A. Milne as well as other less famous poets. I especially love the dreamy illustrations for the bedtime poems. Here is my current favorite:

Manhattan Lullaby

by Norma Farber

Lulled by rumble, babble beep,
let these little children sleep;
let these city girls and boys
dream a music in the noise,
hear a tune their city plucks
up from buses, up from trucks
up from engines wailing fire!
up ten stories high, and higher,
up from hammers, rivets, drills,
up tall buildings, over sills,
up where city children sleep,
lulled by rumble, babble, beep.

The Best Biscuits

When it's below zero and blizzarding (don't laugh, we've had plenty of that this year), I need comfort food. It's not just to make me feel better about being stuck indoors; I need calories for survival. Bring on the fat and bring on the biscuits! Any good Southerner will tell you that the best comfort food is her grandmother's biscuits, but a true southern grandma's biscuit methods are shrouded in mystery. She can toss in flour, scoop up lard with her fingers at random, and pour in buttermilk without measuring. Grandma cannot convey how this heap of dough transforms into fluffy, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth divinity, and my mom has complained that when she does the same the results are bland, white rocks.

My dear grandma hasn't baked her biscuits in years, but I still remember when she came to take care of us when I was in sixth grade while my parents were away. When we got home from school in the afternoon she had a full supper of biscuits, meat, and veg hot and waiting. I never hope to recreate her masterpieces, but I did recreate a reasonable facsimile by following this recipe from Southern Living. I substituted all-purpose flour with baking powder and salt, but otherwise I followed the folding directions precisely. Scarfing one down hot out of the oven, Ickie pronounced them the best he's ever had.

Scarred for Life

On a recent visit, my friend JW recommended Blindness by Jose Saramago. Saramago won a Nobel Prize for this novel, and although it's an impressive achievement, it's as desperate as anything you can imagine.

A sudden and unexplained epidemic of white blindness infects the population. The story follows the small group who are the first to go blind and are interned in a dilapidated mental asylum. Like many of the epidemic/apocalyptic stories I've read lately, this one explores human nature, be it compassionate or degenerate. Saramago's run-on sentences, minimal punctuation (dialogue jumbles together), and unnamed characters convey well the chaos and confusion of the epidemic.

Like other stories in this vein, survival depends on humanity's basest needs: the search for food, shelter, companionship, and a functioning toilet. (I don't mean to be flippant here; let's just say I have a fresh appreciation for plumbing.) Yet Blindness is not utterly without hope. There are many horrors, but some characters act selflessly, wisely, and honorably.

I was worried before beginning the novel that Saramago would have an obvious agenda or message, but his story is richly enigmatic. Near the end of the novel, two of the main characters make a brief and eloquent suggestion of what the blindness might symbolize, but the reader is left to her own theories. The conclusion snuck up on me: suddenly I turned a page to discover I was at the close, and even after all the horror, this lovely, warm, vague emotion washed over me. I didn't end with any clear insight, I simply experienced beautifully written art.

Befuddled at the Close

I believe endings are hard to write. You can have a great story idea, even an entire excellent novel, but when things come to the end it gets tricky. I often prefer stories that are a bit open-ended, so as to spur continuing thought and debate, as opposed to stories where all the ends tie up neatly and seem a bit forced. But sometimes an ending is just odd. In this case I'm referring to the finale of Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud. Stroud also wrote The Bartimeaus Trilogy; he writes Heroes like Bartimeaus: it's unique, it's witty and dark, and Stroud can really DO creepy. The scene in Westminster Abbey in the second Bartimeaus book is one of the eeriest scenes I've ever read.

Stroud does some good things in Heroes of the Valley. He creates a captivating mythology in an isolated valley reminiscent of medieval Scandinavia. The myths frame every chapter and are incorporated into the story well. There are tunneling-zombie-troll monsters that make my hair stand on end. As soon as the reader is convinced of the truth of these old tales, Stroud introduces cause for doubt, so the reader can hardly predict what will happen next. The characters are interesting yet flawed (as in Bartimeaus, the heroine is far more likable than the hero). But the ending, well, it was weird. I did not like it. I didn't hate it, I just didn't get it at all. It wasn't so much a weak conclusion as a strange one. I can't seem to put into words why it's so problematic. Nevertheless, the book was worth reading.